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the Western diet is not, strictly speaking, ecological. But the
industrialization of our food that we call the Western diet is
systematically destroying traditional food cultures. Before the modern
food era - and before nutritionism - people relied for guidance about
what to eat on their national or ethnic or regional cultures. We think
of culture as a set of beliefs and practices to help mediate our
relationship to other people, but of course culture (at least before the
rise of science) has also played a critical role in helping mediate
people's relationship to nature. Eating being a big part of that
relationship, cultures have had a great deal to say about what and how
and why and when and how much we should eat. Of course when it comes to
food, culture is really just a fancy word for Mom, the figure who
typically passes on the food ways of the group - food ways that,
although they were never "designed" to optimize health (we have many
reasons to eat the way we do), would not have endured if they did not
keep eaters alive and well.

The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its 17,000 new
food products introduced every year, and the marketing muscle used to
sell these products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us
where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and
marketing to help us decide questions about what to eat. Nutritionism,
which arose to help us better deal with the problems of the Western
diet, has largely been co-opted by it, used by the industry to sell more
food and to undermine the authority of traditional ways of eating. You
would not have read this far into this article if your food culture were
intact and healthy; you would simply eat the way your parents and
grandparents and great-grandparents taught you to eat. The question is,
Are we better off with these new authorities than we were with the
traditional authorities they supplanted? The answer by now should be clear.

It might be argued that, at this point in history, we should simply
accept that fast food is our food culture. Over time, people will get
used to eating this way and our health will improve. But for natural
selection to help populations adapt to the Western diet, we'd have to be
prepared to let those whom it sickens die. That's not what we're doing.
Rather, we're turning to the health-care industry to help us "adapt".
Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet
is making sick. It's gotten good at extending the lives of people with
heart disease, and now it's working on obesity and diabetes. Capitalism
is itself marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates
into lucrative business opportunities: diet pills, heart-bypass
operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery. But while fast food may be
good business for the health-care industry, surely the cost to society -
estimated at more than $200 billion a year in diet-related health-care
costs - is unsustainable.

BEYOND NUTRITIONISM

To medicalize the diet problem is of course perfectly consistent with
nutritionism. So what might a more ecological or cultural approach to
the problem recommend? How might we plot our escape from nutritionism
and, in turn, from the deleterious effects of the modern diet? In theory
nothing could be simpler - stop thinking and eating that way - but this
is somewhat harder to do in practice, given the food environment we now
inhabit and the loss of sharp cultural tools to guide us through it.
Still, I do think escape is possible, to which end I can now revisit -
and elaborate on, but just a little - the simple principles of healthy
eating I proposed at the beginning of this essay, several thousand words
ago. So try these few (flagrantly unscientific) rules of thumb,
collected in the course of my nutritional odyssey, and see if they don't
at least point us in the right direction.

1. Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much
easier said than done. So try this: Don't eat anything your
great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this
point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go
back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food
products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your
ancestors wouldn't recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars?
Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.

2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims.
They're apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at
best. Don't forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to
claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced,
turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg's can boast about
its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have
become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges
food makers for their endorsement.) Don't take the silence of the yams
as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.

3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a)
unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number - or that
contain high-fructose corn syrup. None of these characteristics are
necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable
markers for foods that have been highly processed.

4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won't find any
high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer's market; you also won't find
food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole
foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of
food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.

5. Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century
devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing
price, not to improving quality. There's no escaping the fact that
better food - measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often
correspond) - costs more, because it has been grown or raised less
intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in
America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on
average, less than ten percent of their income on food, down from 24
percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation. And
those of us who can afford to eat well should. Paying more for food well
grown in good soils - whether certified organic or not - will contribute
not only to your health (by reducing exposure to pesticides) but also to
the health of others who might not themselves be able to afford that
sort of food: the people who grow it and the people who live downstream,
and downwind, of the farms where it is grown.

"Eat less" is the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the
scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is
compelling. "Calorie restriction" has repeatedly been shown to slow
aging in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the
Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link
between diet and cancer prevention. Food abundance is a problem, but
culture has helped here, too, by promoting the idea of moderation. Once
one of the longest-lived people on earth, the Okinawans practiced a
principle they called "Hara Hachi Bu": eat until you are eighty percent
full. To make the "eat less" message a bit more palatable, consider that
quality may have a bearing on quantity: I don't know about you, but the
better the quality of the food I eat, the less of it I need to feel
satisfied. All tomatoes are not created equal.

6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Scientists may disagree on
what's so good about plants - the antioxidants? Fiber? Omega-3s? - but
they do agree that they're probably really good for you and certainly
can't hurt. Also, by eating a plant-based diet, you'll be consuming far
fewer calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are typically less
"energy dense" than the other things you might eat. Vegetarians are
healthier than carnivores, but near vegetarians ("flexitarians") are as
healthy as vegetarians. Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he
advised treating meat more as a flavoring than a food.

7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the
Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules
of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any
traditional diet will do: if it weren't a healthy diet, the people who
follow it wouldn't still be around. True, food cultures are embedded in
societies and economies and ecologies, and some of them travel better
than others: Inuit not so well as Italian. In borrowing from a food
culture, pay attention to how a culture eats, as well as to what it
eats. In the case of the French paradox, it may not be the dietary
nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and
alcohol?!) so much as the dietary habits: small portions, no seconds or
snacking, communal meals - and the serious pleasure taken in eating.
(Worrying about diet can't possibly be good for you.) Let culture be
your guide, not science.

8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take part in the intricate
and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our sustenance is
the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values
implicit in it: that food should be cheap and easy; that food is fuel
and not communion. The culture of the kitchen, as embodied in those
enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet
and health than you are apt to find in any nutrition journal or
journalism. Plus, the food you grow yourself contributes to your health
long before you sit down to eat it. So you might want to think about
putting down this article now and picking up a spatula or hoe.

9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to
your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely
you are to cover all your nutritional bases. That of course is an
argument from nutritionism, but there is a better one, one that takes a
broader view of "health". Biodiversity in the diet means less
monoculture in the fields. What does that have to do with your health?
Everything. The vast monocultures that now feed us require tremendous
amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to keep from collapsing.
Diversifying those fields will mean fewer chemicals, healthier soils,
healthier plants and animals and, in turn, healthier people. It's all
connected, which is another way of saying that your health isn't
bordered by your body and that what's good for the soil is probably good
for you, too.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin


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